The last time Chicago heard Jane Eaglen, a little more than a year ago, the British soprano was lying flat on her back on the stage of the Civic Opera House, wondering what she had gotten herself into.
It was the first “Siegfried” Brunnhilde the British soprano had sung anywhere. To make matters worse, she was stepping into her Lyric Opera debut with no rehearsal, in a production designed for Eva Marton. Her part required her to rapturously greet the dawn and the fearless hero, Siegfried, who had awakened her from a long slumber. The music, full of stratospheric vocal leaps to a high C, is one of the most notorious obstacle courses any soprano can tackle.
Eaglen was so nervous, she recalls, she was certain the audience could hear her heart beating.
To say that she made it through Wagner’s vocal pentathlon without a hitch is an understatement. Eaglen’s two performances had critics composing their own rapturous arias in praise of opera’s hottest new British import since the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel. The exhilarating power of her vocalism and the uncompromised richness and beauty of her voice simply blew everybody away.
Now she is donning Brunnhilde’s helmet and breastplate again at Lyric–but this time she is entering by the front door.
This week Eaglen will perform her first complete “Ring of the Nibelung” anywhere, in the second of Lyric’s three sold-out cycles of the Wagner tetralogy, which runs Monday to Saturday at the Civic Opera House.
Every age prizes its Wagnerian singers; look how Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior and Birgit Nilsson were idolized. But no artist who dwells in this heavyweight repertory has arrived in recent years with quite the stentorian fanfares that have greeted Eaglen. After a concert performance of “Gotterdammerung,” Act III, in Boston in 1994, the Boston Globe wrote of her: “If (Eaglen) is as smart as she seems to be, and if things go right for her, she is going to be the Isolde and Brunnhilde for the next generations.”
For her part, Eaglen seems both pleased and anxious about having to shoulder such high expectations from the music world. She is, after all, only 34, and she has been singing professionally only since she was 22. She doesn’t look like a diva, even if she makes music like one. And when you talk to the pleasant, down-to-earth Eaglen, stardom seems something she is still learning to come to grips with.
“If I take a step back and look at everything that has happened to me in the last 12 years, it’s incredible,” she says over lunch between “Ring” rehearsals. “It’s a little bit daunting that you have to take a deep breath, work from day to day and do the best you can. I’m starting to realize how the stress factor of this business can affect people.”
Perhaps because, down deep, Eaglen really is as strong a woman as the valkyries and princesses and priestesses she plays on stage, she shows no signs of cracking under the stress of performance. Ask her to give you her personal take on the character of Brunnhilde and this is what you will hear:
“With Brunnhilde, the bottom line for me is that she’s a young, feisty girl, intelligent, with a lot of get-up-and-go,” Eaglen says, brightly. “Although circumstances are terrible for her in the last opera, `Gotterdammerung,’ she’s not immediately browbeaten. She doesn’t give in. She fights back.”
That has a familiar ring.
And opera impresarios and record company executives the world over are willing to fight, if need be, to engage the feisty-but-modest diva from the English Midlands. Sony Classical has just signed her to an exclusive five-year recording contract that calls for complete operas as well as aria and song recitals. Her engagement book is full practically through the end of the century. She has more “Ring” cycles scheduled, in Vienna, Milan and Seattle, followed by her first Turandot at the Met and Seattle. Eaglen says the Lyric has approached her about singing Isolde, another heavyweight Wagner role, in 1999, although Lyric won’t confirm.
Why should so young and relatively untempered a singer want to take on opera’s most vocally punishing diva roles so soon in life? Isn’t she afraid of burning herself out before her career has even had the chance to blossom?
“Not really. I’m very strong,” Eaglen declares. “That was something I discovered during my early days at the English National Opera. I was singing my first performance of Verdi’s `Il Trovatore.’ At half past 7 p.m. I was on stage, doing the first aria and thinking, `Oh, my God, I’ve got to sing Leonora’s big aria, `D’amor sull’ ali rosee,” at 20 minutes to 10. So I put a little bit of voice in reserve.
“I know now, from experience, that I can keep going and actually get stronger. In fact, I prefer roles where you have to keep going–where, once you’re on, you stay on. When you’re on for a good long while, you can experiment with vocal possibilities. That’s how I keep my concentration from wavering.”
But the driving force behind Eaglen’s accession to the dramatic soprano repertory, as well as to bel canto parts such as Bellini’s Norma, has been her former teacher at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, Joseph Ward, now her voice coach. Ward, who once sang Britten’s Billy Budd, heard enormous potential in the then-18-year-old singer’s voice. After just three weeks of study, he told her she would sing Norma and Brunnhilde one day.
“My reaction was: Is that good? Should I be pleased? Because, you see, I really didn’t know those parts. He told me to go listen to recordings. I did, and I said to myself: What have I got myself into?” she says, amid gales of laughter.
Ward believed Eaglen was destined to sing Wagner. Even though her technique was not fully in place, he gave her bits and pieces of Wagner to study as a means of learning music and style, trusting her voice would develop at its own natural pace.
Her teacher’s trust was well founded. She jumped from college right into a contract with the ENO, where she paid her dues, getting her first taste of the operatic stage with minor roles such as Berta in Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” and the First Lady in Mozart’s “Magic Flute.” All that experience gave her a solid springboard of experience that landed her her breakthrough part, Donna Anna in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” at Scottish Opera.
Even today, she says she sings Donna Anna wherever and whenever she can. “It’s like castor oil for the voice; it keeps everything in good working order,” she reports.
It was at Ravenna that Eaglen sang her first Norma, a kind of intensive study for her later assumption of the Bellini heroine in Ravenna, Italy, a performance recorded live by EMI and recently issued on compact disc.
If that dizzying profusion of roles, both dramatic and bel canto, attests to anything, it’s that Eaglen confounds every cherished principle known to the music world. Commonplace wisdom tells us that singers don’t mix voice categories the way Eaglen does and expect to survive. By breaking all the rules, she has earned herself the distinction of being the first major international singer since Maria Callas to successfully combine Wagner and bel canto. And Eaglen doesn’t see anything particularly strange in this.
“I just do what feels comfortable to me,” she says. “I do think Wagner and bel canto complement each other. My teacher believed that if you can sing coloratura, you will have no trouble singing Wagner. Wagner needs legato and good phrasing; the bel canto things need expansiveness and control.”
Still, opera is as much about drama as singing. In Chicago as well as in most other theaters where Eaglen has performed, the fact that she happens to be large-figured has inevitably entered into critical evaluations of her acting. Local critics, discussing her most recent Lyric performance, referred to her amply proportioned Brunnhilde and allegedly limited acting skills. Eaglen has drawn criticism of this type for years and she doesn’t mind telling you she’s fed up with it.
“There is the inference in those critiques that if a large soprano is playing a role like Tosca–a character who’s supposed to be madly in love–that a large woman can’t be attractive in that role. It’s absolutely ridiculous! Tosca is an opera singer. That’s who I am. How can they say I can’t play an opera singer?
“I have no problem whatsoever dealing with my size. I’m fit and healthy and strong. I feel comfortable on stage, and I know what suits me and what doesn’t. Now, I could run around the stage and turn cartwheels; I’m fit enough to do that. However, I don’t think it’s particularly becoming.”
The real problem, Eaglen contends, is that too many stage directors don’t know how to use singers whose bodies aren’t particularly lithe but who nevertheless can move around the stage effectively. “If a director can’t appreciate what I have to offer, why should they want to work with me?” she asks. Clearly, Eaglen wants the freedom to be able to stand, sing and make her histrionic points through pure vocalism. Does anyone out there have a problem with that?
Being Jane Eaglen means taking enough time away from the opera and concert stages to just be herself. She maintains a home in St. Albans, a town just north of London. She finds chatting with strangers on the Internet the perfect way to while away the hours in lonely hotel rooms in strange cities. She says she met her current boyfriend, a New York antiques dealer, through one of the computer chat-lines.
Lately she has discovered a bulletin board on CompuServe where she has joined in several lively discussions about the art and business of opera with other devotees. Although she has tried to hide her identity behind a nom du Net, “A few people have guessed who I am, just by the odd comment,” she says, ruefully. Here in Chicago, she has bonded electronically with a fellow “Ring” cast member, also a computer freak. They take turns defending fellow singers who they believe have been unfairly maligned on the Net.
Another of Eaglen’s interests might surprise some people: She admits to being a “maniac” about professional wrestling. No, she doesn’t wrestle herself, but she does regard the physical demands of the sport as analogous to the physical demands of operatic singing. “Singers and wrestlers are basically very talented athletes. Wrestlers also can be brilliant actors; it’s another form of show business, isn’t it?” she says with a laugh.
True enough. And pro wrestlers, Eaglen has discovered, can be just as fanatical about opera as about their own rough-and-tumble sport. Just before she sang her first Norma, with Scottish Opera in 1993, she received a good-luck note from a burly, 6-foot-10 British wrestler known, ominously, as the Undertaker. To this day, she carries the card around in her handbag and proudly produces it on request. Attagirl, Brunnhilde.
